The Bride Stripped Bare

by Nikki Gemmell

  Uh-huh, you nod, and step back.

  You read an article by Germaine Greer, that with motherhood women willingly endure a catastrophic decline in their quality of life. You read a scrap from Sylvia Plath’s journal, that she would feel more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and mother who’s always growing intellectually. Did she believe this? Do you?

  You have no idea what’s ahead.

  You want a child as an eradication of everything you’ve done over the past few months. You feel like you’re willing a baby to have someone to love consumingly in your life, to fill it up. You’ve heard the horror stories, that it’ll be difficult even to find time for the toilet with a baby around, to have a shower or answer the phone, that in labor you could be ripped from vagina to anus, that making love after birth is like throwing a sausage down the Channel Tunnel, that some men hate being with women who’ve been stretched.

  All you know is that with a child your life will swing like an ocean liner changing its course. Which is for the best.

  Lesson 92

  the act of reproduction is the highest and least selfish of our physical functions

  Five weeks after Cole and you have made love on a Saturday morning more tenderly than you’ve ever made love before, you vomit into the toilet beside him as he’s brushing his teeth, it comes heaving upon you in seconds. And the next day in a café, reading but not, you’re so nauseated after a sip of water that you have to rush to the pavement and throw up into the gutter. Something’s drawing on your energy in a way it’s never been drawn upon before. Cole tells you to buy a pregnancy kit but you want to wait until the weekend, when he’s home and you’re both relaxed: you want some sanctity to the event. It can’t be done at night, it needs the morning when the hormones are strongest, the packet tells you that.

  You bombard the plastic stick with your urine, you piss hot and strong. Two stripes. You shake the stick, they will not be shaken out.

  So, confirmed.

  It’s worked, it’s not meant to work so quickly. Women of your age are always taking months, or despairing years now, or forever.

  There’s a great spreading warmth as you cup your belly in the palm of your hand. Well, hello, my little one, tummy-tucked, firm in the world, hello. You walk out of the bathroom and Cole’s nodding and smiling and enfolding you in his arms, so tight, it hurts, and tears are pricking the eyes of you both.

  So, to be wiped, cleansed, to start afresh. You hope.

  Lesson 93

  when unwell we required to be healed

  You call your mother with the baby news. She’s not as joyful as you’d expected, there’s a tone in her voice; it’s a shock to you. You wonder what, if anything, you’ve done to irritate her. Perhaps she feels the baby will be limiting, that she’s still waiting for you to have a bigger life. Perhaps she fears her own aging. Can’t stand the thought of being called gran. Doesn’t want a child all over again, messing up her comfortable world and forcing her to babysit. You sometimes got the feeling, as a teenager, that she was a little too eager to expel you from the nest: she encouraged you often to get your own place and, when you did, could barely contain her annoyance if you returned to wash clothes or use her sewing machine.

  The relationship is always like this, up and down, best friends one day and not speaking the next. She asks how you’re feeling. She says she vomited for the entire nine months. She says that having a child will settle you.

  Oh, really?

  You don’t ask what she means by that, don’t want to set her off. Generally you live in terror of each other, of the hurt you can both inflict. Something changed when Cole firmed in your life. Your mother knows where your jugular is and sometimes, viciously, goes for it, as if hurting you is a way of holding you. She used to do it, occasionally, when you were child. Like when your report card announced lacking in initiative and you’d had to ask, as an eight-year-old, what the strange word meant, and she’d reminded you throughout your childhood and teenage years and with your teaching career and your marriage choice.

  Lacking in initiative. You hang up the phone and have to chuckle, wondering what she’d say now. You’ve been chuckling a lot lately; your mother can still hurt but not as much. For the baby inside you is flooding you with joy, is evening you out.

  Lesson 94

  there are plenty of indoor games, such as romps, acting charades and so on

  But sometimes you feel a slipping, usually in the morning, around the time Gabriel used to ring. A haunting, like a war veteran’s missing limb. When you need it back, the vividness of that time of the teaching.

  Want, again, unfurls under your skin.

  There was nothing resigned in those afternoons you both swallowed in one gulp like an oyster slurp. There was a lesson near the end, the one before you walked out, when he was holding your toes and saying he didn’t want to lose you for sex was you to him, you embodied it. The honesty of it was dumping you like a wave on the hard sand and you’d stumbled and laughed that it was impossible, how could a relationship ever work and anyway, all women had this in them, not just you, all he had to do was find a way to unlock it in every woman he was with. To listen. To ask. To learn. There was a whole world out there and he was shutting down as you spoke and nodding, yes, of course and he was kissing you, softly, yes, tremulously, yes, as if, suddenly, he had no right to kiss you at all.

  And now in the morning, around the time Gabriel would ring, you waver, you wonder if you’d been too harsh. During that penultimate lesson, as you said good-bye, you’d held his head in your hands and knew that you were already, then, beginning to let go; even though you couldn’t bear the thought of it happening just yet.

  Lesson 95

  the mother’s moral unfitness is to be greatly deplored

  At seven weeks old the baby makes you vomit on the pavement outside the post office and then outside the news agency and there’s no time even for the gutter; like a dog with its posts you mark your haunts. But it’s joyous sickness, if there can be such a thing, for it’s telling you that the baby’s strong within you.

  It’s changing you already. You crave fresh meat and rice cakes and raw vegetables, fruit and milk. It drags you from your ruby wines and limpid cheeses, your peanut butter and pâtés. It spoils your taste for chocolate, the canny thing. It urges you to the freezer, to trays of ice cubes that you consume in frenzies of furious crunch.

  And now we are three, Cole says softly, wondrously, one night in the close dark. Yes, you reply, yes, thinking of the strange motivation for this child, its frantic, panicky kickstart into life. Thinking of Theo. You wonder if she fell pregnant as quickly as you; if she’s been flooded with the happy hormones, too. It feels strange, in a way, to be embarking on this journey without her close.

  Lesson 96

  there should be free admission of light and air

  Someone hangs up the phone on the answering machine so all that’s recorded is a click, and after being exasperated once too often you answer. Silence, on the other end, and the receiver is put down.

  You don’t want games, you have no time for them any more, you have something else in your life.

  Then another letter arrives. It’s hand delivered, there’s no postmark. You’re not even sure you want to open it; you hold the envelope by a corner like a detective with a forensic specimen, you toy with just throwing it out.

  It’s me. I can’t do this any more, I’m sorry. I wish we’d had a chance to talk.

  That’s it. You crumple it into the bin. Return to your pregnancy book.

  Lesson 97

  filth fevers cause more deaths than either war or famine

  You sprawl on the couch in the living room, ripely alone.

  Cole lies asleep in the bedroom.

  He doesn’t want to be intimate anymore, he’s afraid of harming the baby now you’re showing, he’s repulsed by the thought of making love to a pregnant woman. That Demi Moore, on the cover of Vanity Fai
r, it was disgusting, he’s said.

  So, the lounge room, by yourself, and your fingers float down between your legs, they circle and tease and dip inside and tremors flutter in your stomach and then your fingers move faster and deeper and the tremors sharpen, they shoot upward into your belly and your chest and you can hardly breathe; you grab at the rug and come like you’ve never come before, for the pregnancy is making you more sensitive than you’ve ever been, it’s tuning you as finely as a concert grand.

  You expected a life made stodgy by fat ankles and smocks and bloat. But as the child brews in its vat you’re thrumming with life and with want, it’s a halo of energy around you and you never anticipated that.

  Cole stirs. Come to bed, he cries out, get some sleep.

  Lesson 98

  patching is one of the most difficult tasks for unskilled fingers

  Exactly two years after the afternoon in Marrakech.

  Theo’s birthday, June the first, and it’s marked forever now by the moment of discovery. You need distraction; you invite three old colleagues from City University to dinner. Cole’s out with a mate from school, seeing the latest James Bond.

  As you bumble about in the kitchen, chopping and pouring and stirring, the conversation moves through clothes, haircuts, colleagues, flats and then settles on what it always does with these friends: men. Megan tells you she still hasn’t slept with her partner, Dom, it’s been going on like this for eight years; they’ve become like brother and sister. She’s thirty-nine, she wants a baby. She’s not sure what’s wrong with Dom; he doesn’t want sex anymore, he always pushes her away.

  Could he be gay, perhaps?

  No.

  Leave him, you all say. Before you’re forty-eight and still childless, and it’s too late.

  It’s hard, you know, she answers back.

  Then she turns to you, God knows why: have you ever been to a male prostitute?

  No, you snort, laughing.

  Have you ever thought about it?

  No.

  I really want to do it, but I haven’t got a clue how.

  You look across at Cath, conspicuously silent. She’s your closest friend from work. She has one of the happiest marriages you know and two beautiful boys in their teens. She has affairs all the time, has been having them for years; and she has a lot of sex with her husband, Mike, who’s blissfully unaware. It creates this hunger for him, she told you once, I just can’t stop. I don’t want to. Ever.

  You always wondered what would happen if Mike found out. You wonder, now, about Cole: it’s a reaction you couldn’t predict. You shudder involuntarily as you stir the pasta, at the thought of him stumbling upon your secret life.

  Lesson 99

  look well after your plants, water them carefully, remove all dead leaves

  You try your mother again. Want her close, crave her knowledge now you’re pregnant for she’s been through this too. But she’s on a dig in southeast Russia, for the entire summer. She’s working on a marine predator who terrorized the oceans one hundred and fifty million years ago and had teeth the size of machetes. Six have already been found and are still so sharp that several of the dig team have been cut. She’s assessing the area around the animal’s digestive tract for evidence of what it ate and has unearthed squid-like fossils and ancient fish scales, and is loving the work. And the hot. She tells you there’s a heat-wave at the moment and the sky is a screeching blue.

  It sounds heavenly, you respond.

  It is, she says. Her tone this time is lighter, as if she’s had time to give the impending event some thought. But then she slips in the fish-hooked comment that you might shed all your selfishness once you’re a mother and you feel the familiar tightness in your throat and want to slam the phone down but don’t; you need at least one thing smoothed out in your life.

  You don’t know what she perceives as your selfishness. The fact, perhaps, you’ve never expressed gratitude that she raised you for so long, by herself? You developed a defense for her barbs long ago: the phone is put down mid-conversation, or you let the comments pass, or you walk out. It seems so exhausting to stay there and fight.

  What’s wrong, Cole asks that night, something’s eating you up.

  I don’t know, I just feel all at sea, I’m sorry.

  Why don’t you go and see your mum. Take a break. Sort it out with her.

  You imagine flinging sun into your lungs; scouring away Gabriel and the taxi drivers with the hurting light, sleeping late, bonding with your mother, sorting out your life. The balm and quiet of a maternal retreat.

  Yes, you say to Cole, yes, why not.

  You call her back the next morning.

  I’m not sure it’s the place for someone who’s pregnant, she says. It’s pretty rough. It’s dusty and hot, and most of the roads are dirt.

  I just need to get out of London. Please.

  OK, she laughs, OK. I can understand that.

  Lesson 100

  airing is an essential process

  To a plain that was once an inland sea. It’s now crusted over with salt and the bones of old vessels leer up from its bed like the carcasses of the prehistoric beasts underneath. Fishermen had chased the water as it bled from their grasp, they’d tried reaching out to it with huge concrete wharfs stretching like fingers into the vastness. But steadily the water leaked away as the river that fed it was run dry by thousands of miles of irrigation systems, canals and dams, and one day there was no sea left. The skewed three-masted crosses of the long-gone fishermen now shout their accusation on the remains of the old shores. And the only people who still want to come to the dusty town on the plain’s edge are palaeontologists, greedy for bones.

  The single-engine plane skips raggedly over a dirt runway and then pulls up, ballerina crisp, at a terminal resembling a bus shelter. Its tin roof basks under a godless blue sweep of sky. An elderly man tends the flowers in pots by the door; he’s keeping the incongruous colors alive with all the zeal of a pub owner in an English summer. He examines the single suitcase of the lone passenger who alights, the city clothes, the face. All you give him is a nod.

  The smell of his hose on wet concrete plunges you back to childhood and you lift your chin to the sky. This is your kind of air, as dry as your grandmother’s tissue paper skin and you can feel your body straightening within it. Your mother swerves into the car park in a four-wheel drive from the dig’s sponsors. You haven’t seen her for so long. It’s a shock, the aging. The old man waves a one-toothed grin in farewell; all’s right with the world now, you’re placed.

  As you’re driven to your mother’s tinny little prefab house you know you’ll outstay your welcome. You wonder how long it’ll last, if you’ll have time to unwind.

  Her clothes spill across the rooms, pushing anyone else out. There are suitcases half unpacked and piles of unsorted washing. She can’t find a spare towel among the rolls of bubble wrap and bags of plaster of Paris and fine chisels and brushes, and she apologizes for not cleaning up. She’s been alone too long.

  But it doesn’t matter. You want this to work.

  The first night you cackle together as your gift of fresh Belgian chocolates explode like soft clouds in your mouths. Tonight’s fine, for a couple of days it’ll be fine and if you’re lucky, a week. The plan is to sleep greedily by night and by day to relax and reclaim a simpler life. It begins well: the nuggety people in the few, spare shops beam at your belly. Well, isn’t that something, say their smiles, as if this is what life is all about. You visit the dig site in your hiking boots and hat, and the team leader insists on you taking his fold-up seat. But soon you’re walking the dusty streets churning and damaged and hot, rubbing at the old wrinkle between your eyebrows. Your mother’s house seems to collect the warmth and contain it: the toothpaste’s warm, and the deodorant when you roll it on. You’d always craved the heat but now, for the first time in your life, you buckle under it. The baby’s changing you so much.

  But not enough.

  For
even here Gabriel follows, even while you’re swimming in the town’s pool. You do laps every day, pushing away hard from the edge and stretching the limbs as far as you can and feeling the curve of the muscles as you try to swim him out. But every morning you snap awake to a day that’s raw, with an unexplained panic churning in your gut. Your bones rise tired from your mother’s spare bed as if they’ve been struggling with its softness all night, tensing against it, resisting it. And after six days your mother makes it known that she loves her alone too much. It’s always the pattern, the sudden tightness in her voice and then the explosion from you both, and you turn into the woman who’s rarely allowed out. This time, over a name for the child.

  You could never use your father’s, your mother says. You’d never want a reminder of someone as useless as that.

  There’s still so much bottled-up bitterness over him, after all these years, and you can only guess it’s because they were once, consumingly, in love. Your father’s often the reason for a fight, you’re thoroughly sick of this cul-de-sac you both, always, end up in, it’s been going on for twenty-five years. Your mother’s jealous of your love for him, still, she feels your devotion was blinded and foolish, and she’s spent a lifetime, as a consequence, trying to convince you of his flaws. He was always drunk, useless, pathetic, never did a thing with his life, didn’t love you because he never gave me enough money for you, made it so hard for me, the words are always the same, ever since you were ten, and they’ve only succeeded in turning you from her.